Robbie Swinnerton serves up morsels from the foodiest city on the planet

food and drink

12/26/2015

December 2015: After a prolonged (4-year) stay of execution, the wonderful Omotesando Koffee is due to finally close its doors at the end of the month. That leaves only a few more days to revisit – or discover for the first time – this modern/retro Tokyo classic.

This was my original post from September 2011…

We dropped into Omotesando Koffee over the weekend and loved it. Not that it's the kind of place you'd stumble upon by chance in the grid of residential streets that lie between Omotesando and Gaienmae.

But it's really worth tracking down. Because it's a contemporary classic. You enter through an old-style gateway, into a neat little manicured garden...

And in the middle of that room is the counter and gleaming red/silver espresso machine, all 'enclosed' in an open cuboid frame of black steel.

Owner Eiichi Kunitomo is a trained barista, and perfected his technique while living in Ischia (Tyrrhenian Sea / Gulf of Naples) for a while. An Osaka native, he says he'd love to take this idea down to Kansai, but it's way behind Tokyo in terms of espresso culture.

He also cooks what he calls his koffee kashi (sweets). He describes them as baked custard, but essentially they're canelés – dark and slightly caramel bitter on the outside, nice and moist and yellow inside – which he cooks in cute little cubes in a diminutive oven hidden in a side alcove...

You can buy them singly to have with your coffee, or in stylishly packaged sets of five to take home with you...

And that's it. You stand at the counter while he prepares your coffee. Then when it's ready and dispensed into its cardboard cup, you nurse it standing on the side of the room or retreat to one of the benches in the garden (or carry it back to your office/apartment).

There's just one downside to Omotesando Koffee: it's temporary – and the clock is ticking down. Kunitomo only has this space until the end of the year (when the house is due to be demolished). At least that was the initial arrangment with the owner/landlord. However, there has been such a strong buzz about the place that the owner's agreed to let it continue into next year – and possibly even longer. We've got our fingers crossed...

But even if that does happen, then Kunitomo will just take his coffee machine, his kashi oven and his counter (and that striking steel frame) and find another location.

That's the beauty of his concept – it can be taken anywhere. And if you look at his web site, you can see the list of places where he envisages setting up more of his minimalist coffee shops.

UPDATE (June 2013): Another coffee shop that is based on a very similar template to Omotesando Koffee -- thanks to Kunitomo's involvement as producer -- is Café Kitsuné, which opened earlier this year. The menu and style is very similar, with the same cuboid Kashi canelés and a similar blend of old and traditional.

03/12/2015

Just back to Japan from Singapore, where I attended the awards ceremony for the annual Asia's 50 Best Restaurants. This was its third year, but the first under new voting rules*, which meant that there was quite a shake-up in the rankings this time.

The number of countries represented was up – Cambodia and the Philippines featured for the first time – with some making a bigger splash than before, especially host Singapore (10 on the list; up from 8) and South Korea (3; from 1).

Conversely, this meant a drop in the number of restaurants from Japan represented on the list (8 down from 10), with Ishikawa and Sawada both mystifyingly dropping out of sight.

Here are the ones that remain in the rankings (last year's positions in parentheses):

2 (2) Narisawa ナリサワ

4 (5) Nihonryori RyuGin 日本料理龍吟

12 (25) L'Effervescence レフェルベソンス14 (42) Hajime ハジメ

33 (34) Takazawa タカザワ

40 (43) Sushi Saito 鮨さいとう

44 (38) Sukiyabashi Jiro すきやばし次郎

49 (22) Quintessence カンテサンス

Congratulations to one and all, especially to Hajime Yoneda (Hajime), not just as the Highest Climber this year, but for representing Osaka and reminding us there is so much more to dining in Japan than just the restaurants in Tokyo; and to Shinobu Namae (L'Effervescence), for such a strong showing. And – of course – to our two Yokozuna Grand Champions, Yoshihiro Narisawa (Narisawa); and Seiji Yamamoto (Nihonryori RyuGin)!

At the same time, several of the other Top 50 restaurants have direct links to Japan, from Waku Ghin (9th; Tetsuya Wakuda's Singapore operation) and Tenku RyuGin (24th; the Hong Kong outpost of RyuGin) to Shinji by Kanesaka (32nd; Singapore). While others are Japanese in inspiration, such as Wasabi by Morimoto (29th; Mumbai) and Nihonbashi (31st; Colombo).

Meanwhile, there was a massive round of applause for Tetsuya Wakuda for winning the Lifetime Achievement award: Brilliant work!

But for me, the best moment of all was the announcement that Hidemi Sugino had won the title as Asia's Best Pastry Chef. A huge and totally deserved appreciation of the brilliant (and very self-effacing) master pâtissier!

In late January, I was back in Kyoto, this time to attend the Washoku-do symposium, an event — hopefully annual — sponsored by the Japanese government to back the propagation of washoku (Japanese cuisine) around the world.

The event brought together some of Japan’s most revered chefs, including Yoshihiro Murata, of the renowned Kyoto kaisekirestaurant Kikunoi, and Toru Okuda, of Kojyu in Tokyo.

Several top French chefs were also invited, among them Alain Ducasse — who was also one of the judges in the World Washoku Challenge, a cooking competition for non-Japanese chefs.

I managed to speak at some length with Chef Ducasse about the event, about the participating chefs in the cooking competition and about his love of washoku.